Metanoia, Desubjectivisation, and Psychadelics

Opportunity and Remorse, Girolamo da Capri, 1541


To the extent that such a ‘passive decision’ can be accounted for at all, it is as a matter of conversion or metanoia, a radical perspectival shift that unfolds in an almost magical manner, as something that happens to or befalls us rather than something that we choose or produce.

Sergei Pozorov on Agamben and Politics

Whatever we can achieve through merit and effort cannot make us truly happy. Only magic can do that. At that point, when we have wrenched it away from fate, happiness coincides entirely with our knowing ourselves to be capable of magic.

Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, 2007

Night was coming on. I saw the sky, some stars, and a few leaves. This first sensation was a moment of delight. I was conscious of nothing else. In this instant I was being born again, and it seemed as if all I perceived was filled with my frail existence. Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me. I felt throughout my whole being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker

Metanoia means afterthought, from meta meaning "after" or "beyond" and nous meaning "mind". In Classical Greek metanoia meant changing one's mind about someone or something. When personified, Metanoia was depicted as a shadowy goddess, cloaked and sorrowful, who accompanied Kairos, the god of Opportunity, sowing regret and inspiring repentance for the "missed moment". This conventional portrayal continued through the Renaissance. "The elements of repentance, regret, reflection, and transformation are always present in the concept of metanoia to some degree, ..."

Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (c. 25 BCE – c. 50 CE) depicted metanoia as “in heaven, a beautiful and especially good daughter of the Most High.” There, “she entreats God Most High hourly” on behalf of people.